Monthly Archives: March 2009

Its lucky I don’t live in Westmount. No, not because of the astronomical taxes on those multi-million dollar mansions…”if you have to ask how much, you can’t afford it” seems to be the operative order-of-the-day in the rarefied air of this snooty enclave of the rich and famous (Envious? Bitter? you might ask…Damn right I say!). No, its because I would by now be in jail for all the birdseed lying on my walkways, in violation of that municipality’s by-law against all feeding of wild animals.

This post is sure to kill my cousin George, an expat Canadian working and living for the last few years in Greece. Every time I post something about yet another government incursion into personal freedom, he grows increasingly ballistic and effusive in his barrage of expletives. Well, George, read-em and weep. Full story here. Just take a Valium beforehand.

Which reminds me….last night I got a call from my son working on his car in our garage. “Can’t you hear the raccoon orgy on our front lawn?” he said. Apparently a group of four raccoons were having some kind of beach-blanket bingo out there. Hmmm…..maybe over some birdseed? I wonder.

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Earlier this Winter I wrote about how we had decided to use birdseed as the abrasive on our walkways, instead of salt or crushed stone. Salt destroys cement, and the crushed stone makes for a messy cleanup in the Spring. The beauty of birdseed is that it not only actually works as an abrasive, but the cleanup is a breeze with lots of free labor! Our walkways are teeming with squirrels, and birds of every variety, eagerly reducing the load of seeds to nothing. As I write this there are two squirrels, a dove, and a half-dozen blackbirds working away at the cleanup.

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Leisureguy commented yesterday that he hadn’t tried pizza from the BBQ yet. When a food lover like Leisureguy who lives in a Mecca of food trends like California hasn’t yet tried BBQ pizza, well sir, its time to talk about BBQ pizza!

Simply put, until you’ve cooked your pizza in the BBQ….you haven’t had “real” pizza as Mr. Italo would say. That’s because the BBQ makes a pizza crust that is about as close to cooking it in a wood oven as you can get. But it does demand a certain know-how which I can supply today, having made pizza in the BBQ a few hundred times.

You will need a “holy” pizza pan, Batman. No, not one blessed by the Church. A pizza pan with holes in the bottom. Readily available in most cooking implement stores.You can use a gas BBQ or a charcoal one.

Make your home-made dough as usual but sized for a thin-crust pizza. Spread it out on the holy pizza pan. With a fork, poke the dough in about 20 places, to avoid the development of large bubbles. Place the pizza pan and dough in the middle of a BBQ which you have preheated at High for about 10 minutes. Temperature should be above 400F if there is a thermometer on the BBQ cover. Close the cover. Every 15 seconds or so, open the cover and rotate the pizza pan. With a spatula, keep raising the crust and have a look to make sure it isn’t burning. The dough will cook very quickly, say in about 3-5 minutes. Now place a second holy pizza pan on top of the pizza and flip it over. The goal is to get the uncooked side onto another pizza pan.

Before putting the pizza into the BBQ again, dress the now cooked and crusty top as desired. My personal favorite: A thin layer of homemade pesto, a few thin slices of fresh tomato, and some slices of freshly-cut fresh mozzarella di buffalo.

Place the pizza back in the BBQ and watch it as previously. You don’t want the crust to burn, although a few dark spots give a nice smoky flavor. For a crispy cheese crust, finish the pizza in the oven broiler for a couple of minutes.

That’s it. Cut and enjoy the best pizza you’ll ever make at home.

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I’ve become somewhat obsessed with pizza dough, ever since I made my own for the first time last week. These days I’m experimenting with various types of flour. Like fresh-squeezed orange juice, there is no real substitute for homemade pizza dough…and I’m becoming increasingly fond of both and having trouble going back to commercial variants.

But its today’s pizza topping I want to bring to your attention. Absolutely fantastic!

I caramelized some onions in olive oil and as they were getting nice and brown I threw in a few cups of thinly sliced button mushrooms, some chopped up semi-dried sun-dried tomatoes, and salt and pepper. I continued to fry up this mixture until the mushrooms had yielded most of their water and the whole mass had a nice rich brown tint. I put a thin layer of tomato sauce on my freshly laid out pizza dough, topped it with the caramelized onion/mushroom/sun-dried tomato mix and then laid in some very thin slices of artisanal dried salami from Les Iles de la Madelaine (Madelaine Islands) in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Topped the whole thing with a dusting of mozzarella and baked at 550F in a “holy” pizza pan until done.

Mmmmmmmmm!!!

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I was a late bloomer academically and went back to school in the mid ’90’s to complete my graduate work in Psychology. I was at California State University during the early years of the Internet as a popularly accessible information source. The first course I was obliged to take was geared towards developing critical thinking skills and learning how to weed through the information minefield of the Internet. Even in those neolithic years, it was already replete with bullshit masquerading as credible academic information. A phenomenal text that we used is David Hackett Fischer’s Historians’ Fallacies. This book examines the dozens and dozens of mistakes we all make every day in assessing the validity, accuracy, and reliability of the information that confronts us in the media, the Internet, and even person-to-person.

Child development specialists say that the most effective parenting style is the authoritative model, whereby the child recognizes you as a credible information resource and actually seeks out your opinion. This parenting style is most important as the child gets older and begins to think independently. My son rarely agrees with my opinion about anything, but I am quite proud of the fact that he actually asks me what I think….and then proceeds to argue with me until we are both blue in the face! Nevertheless, I guess as parents we must seek validation where we can get it!

I mention this because our arguments are almost always about the credibility of the information he brings to the discussion table. I almost always ask him: Who says so? What’s his/her background? Do they have a particular axe to grind? What are their credentials? Did you actually witness what they are talking about? Who are their sources of information? Etc. This inevitably drives him into paroxysms of frustration and mutterings of “Yeah, right, like you know everything!”.

Today’s musings are a result of last night’s discussion of the AIG bonus scandal, during “card night” at Mr. Italo’s. By accident, I had actually watched the congressional sub-committee hearings a few days earlier, so had seen the grilling of Edward Liddy. Yet, all of the opinions around the table centered on media reports rather than actual direct fact-gathering from primary sources…my own included, BTW….until I actually watched the hearings rather than waiting for the media to interpret them for me. See the previous post “Edward Liddy – AIG CEO – nailed?” for a sampling of just how pernicious and unreliable the media can be. Some media outlets do a better job than others. Here’s a pretty good summary from CANWEST based on my own watching of the actual hearings.

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Look at how the media distorts everything and how little fact-gathering there actually is. Even the use of the word “nailed” in the title is geared to sensationalize the story, yet the facts are quite different. Its also interesting to note that Edward Liddy was parachuted into the AIG situation by the government only six months ago in order to save the company and completely without any compensation, present or future. This was recognized by the politicians at the congressional sub-committee hearings last week. Yet, he and others are already receiving death-threats because of the gross misinformation spread by the media and our tendency to rely on them for our “facts”.

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This blog is reserved for my personal musings, hobbies, interests, etc., and I have systematically avoided introducing anything of a “business” nature to it. But I will digress from that policy for a moment just to announce the launch of our new dedicated web site for Psychmentation™, my company’s flagship product, which I actually developed over the last 15 years.

In 1994 we were asked to uncover the reasons for massive employee turnover (35% per year) at one of our large pharma clients. Senior management believed that it was due to below industry-average wages, but nevertheless, wanted a thorough investigation of the reasons. We planned to interview a broad cross-section of employees but also recognized that it wouldn’t be an easy task since we surmised that most people would be hesitant to talk about their dissatisfaction with a bunch of strangers payed by their employer.

I decided to try something different, going back to my early clinical experiences and how we used to focus on building trust through a variety of methods geared to assure confidentiality and a zero-risk environment, where people could truly “open up” in comfort and safety. Its important to note here that this is not usually done in a commercial context; the methods of industrial psychologists draw little upon the experiences of their clinical brethren – a strange phenomenon of “silos” that develops from the moment one decides to take one path vs another in graduate school.

The rest, as they say, is history. We were stunned to discover that under the right circumstances, people would disclose their most intimate and heartfelt perceptions, including things that would have been inconceivable using traditional research methods. We took this early success and started applying it to more and more business cases where we felt that there might be disclosure barriers, continuously perfecting our methodology. We branded this “product”, Psychmentation™ and it has become our biggest and most succesful service. Have a look at the web site and associated blog here if you like.

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There are cooks and there are bakers. Few can do both equally well. I hate baking because it requires a precision that isn’t in my temperament; I’m more from the a-little-bit-of-this and a-little-bit-of-that school. “Elasticity” is the buzzword in cooking, i.e. within a certain range of ingredients and technique, its pretty hard to screw up. But baking! That’s a whole different story. “Add water slowly until the consistency is just right”. What the Hell does “just right” look like anyway? My wife seems to know, and she’s an excellent baker. My grandmother’s recipe for her shortbread cookies reads: “Add as much butter as the flour will take”. How do I know when its taken enough…do I ask it? But bakers just seem to know these things.

So it was with some trepidation that I decided to make pizza dough yesterday. I followed the basic recipe in the Cuisinart book, also available on-line here. Piece of cake (pun intended). No, really, pretty easy, and it made for an outstanding pizza dough, although for the life of me I couldn’t get the pizzas round…they all turned out square. And the ultimate compliment…my normally surly son and his girlfriend both waxed enthusiastic about how good the pizza was.

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Its expected to go up to 10C today (about 50F) which I find is the temperature threshold for outdoor biking, at least for me (yeah, I know, I’m a wuss). I brought my Gary Fisher Sugar 2 mountain bike up from the basement and pumped up the tires in anticipation of today’s first ride of the season. Riding a mountain bike with knobby tires on city streets used to be quite a chore and I didn’t realize just how inefficient it is until I rode with our intrepid New York correspondent, Mr. Dario, a couple of years ago on his last visit to Montreal. I struggled to keep up with him and he commented that my tires were really holding me back. I pooh-poohed the suggestion, preferring to take the blame myself for being in such poor shape. But he did get me thinking, and a few months later I had the bike shop install a pair of smooth “street” tires on the bike. What a difference. Not only is the ride more comfortable but I can go much faster. And if the ride is more comfortable and more fun….you got it….you tend to ride longer and get more exercise. If you ride a knobby-tired bike in the city, its worth the switch!